When comparing qBittorrent vs aria2, the Slant community recommends qBittorrent for most people. In the question“What are the best Torrent clients?”qBittorrent is ranked 1st while aria2 is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose qBittorrent is:

qBittorrent is available as free, ad-less software licensed under GPL with source code available on [GitHub](https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/). Being open source allows anyone to check if the software has no malicious code, is secure and respects privacy.

Pros

Pro

Free, ad-less and open source

qBittorrent is available as free, ad-less software licensed under GPL with source code available on GitHub. Being open source allows anyone to check if the software has no malicious code, is secure and respects privacy.

Pro

Lightweight

Pro

Full-featured

qBittorrent covers basics such as Prioritization, Selective Downloading, DHT, PEX, LPD and Magnet URIs as well as Broadcatching, Sequential downloading and Search. It includes MSE/PE for security. It has graphical, web and command line interfaces. Has UPnP, NAT-PMP, NAT traversal for automatic router configuration. Has UDP tracker and µTP data transfer protocol support. Even covers Tracker Exchange, IPv6, web seeding, Embedded tracker, Super-seeding and proxy servers.

Pro

Sequential downloading

Allows to download the first file of a series prior to the following items.

Pro

Auto torrent adding

Torrents can be automatically read from a folder.

Pro

Preload Magnet metadata

Obtain lists of files in Magnet before prompting the user for a download location.

Pro

Allows share ratio limiting

Can configure to what ratio (amount uploaded/amount uploaded) the torrent should be seeded. You can also configure on whether you want them to be paused or removed after this.

May also set this directly in the ~/.config/qBittorrent/qBittorrent.conf:

Pro

Enables streaming media while it's downloading

qBittorrent supports sequential downloading that allows users to download files in sequential order. That means that media such as video or audio can be streamed a the same way it can be with any other streaming service.

Pro

In-Program torrent search via various search-engines

Pro

Super-seeding

Algorithm that helps downloaders to be able to become uploaders more quickly.

Pro

Can be used to create torrents (embedded tracker)

qBittorrent can be used to create a torrent to share large files/folders with other people.

Pro

RSS support

Add RSS feeds for automatic downloading. Apply filters to only download what you want.

Pro

Good web interface

The remote API and web interface works well. There is headless version too (called qbittorrent-nox).

Pro

IP filtering

IP filtering blocks set IP addresses. It's usually used to block communications with certain companies that are against p2p activity, etc.

Pro

Tracker exchange

Makes it possible for BitTorrent peers to learn about new trackers for a swarm they have joined. Ideally ending up with every peer knowing about every tracker used for the torrent

Pro

Has a command line interface and a daemon

Can be run on a headless Linux (for text-only mode from the command-line without requiring X11). The package is commonly named qbittorrent-nox (and it's officially supported by qBittorrent).

Pro

Search engine plugins

What i love most about qbit is the "SEARCH" option thru major torrent-websites.

Pro

Supports multiple download protocols

Has support for lots of download protocols including BitTorrent, Metalink, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP.

Pro

Small memory footprint

Due to aria2 being a CLI only tool it uses very little memory.

Pro

Free and open source

Pro

Remote control over simple standartized RPC

XML or JSON-based RPCs can be used to control aria2 remotely with both APIs completely documented. Simplest client that uploads torrent to be downloaded is 3 Python lines long (no 3rd-party libraries, only stdlib).Run aria2c --help=#rpc to see more.

Pro

Third parties offer a clean web interface

Some web interfaces consist of pure HTML+JS, no server-side needed (except aria2c of course). It uses the same RPC that can work even over WebSockets.

Ad

Cons

Con

Has issues with large torrent numbers

Various issues occur with large torrent numbers (anywhere between 300 and 1000 torrents) including timestamp and file corruptions.

Con

Torrent downloads can freeze

Multiple people have reported that torrents stop downloading and stay in a "stalled" state indefinitely.

Con

Old UI

Looks a bit ugly.

Con

WebUI version is slow when going into files tab

It's moving in slow motion when accessing the files tab on the WebUI of a seedbox.

Con

Needs to be reinstalled from time to time

Sometimes it just stops downloading, the fix is uninstalling and installing again. It's a pain, but ends up working.

Con

Search engine requires installing Python

Con

Consumes much RAM

It doesn't leave small footprint on your system.

Con

Constant IO error

Con

No native graphical user interface

While there is a web-based GUI, there is no native interface.

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